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Contents lists

T. E. Lawrence to V. W. Richards

[August, 1920]

[22 lines omitted]
(ii) Re Oxford. To finish my 'Boy-Scout' book by Sept. 30 will mean my
spending August and September in All Souls: solid: the more you can come
down in that time the better I will work: so please don’t limit yourself
to Sept. 24 etc. Any date in those days will do perfectly: and the
longer the better. Your critical faculty would be invaluable: because
though it's only a cheap book written to buy Pole Hill and build its
house, yet it's got to have my name on it — therefore I don’t want it to
be despicable.

(iii) Re prose. The
extract sent is nearly perfect: but prose depends on a music in one's
head which involuntarily chooses and balances the possible words to keep
tune with the thought. The best passages in English prose all deal with
death or the vanity of things, since that is a tune we all know, and the
mind is set quite free to think while writing about it. Only it can't be
kept up very long, because of mortal weakness and the wear and tear of
things, and the function of criticism, revision, and correction
(polishing) seems to me to be either

It seems to me that
if you think too hard about the form, you forget the matter, and if your
brain is wrestling with the matter, you may not have attention to spare
for the manner. Only occasionally in things constantly dwelt upon, do
you get an unconscious balance, and then you get a spontaneous and
perfect arrangement of words to fit the idea, as the tune. Polishing is
an attempt, by stages, to get to what should be a single combined
stride.

L.

Source:

DG 318

Checked:

jw/

Last revised:

22 January 2006

T. E. Lawrence chronology

﻿

1888 16 August: born
at Tremadoc, Wales

1896-1907: City of Oxford High School for Boys

1907-9: Jesus College, Oxford, B.A., 1st Class Hons, 1909

1910-14: Magdalen College, Oxford (Senior Demy), while working at the British
Museum's excavations at Carchemish

1915-16: Military Intelligence Dept, Cairo

1916-18: Liaison Officer with the Arab Revolt

1919: Attended the Paris Peace Conference

1919-22: wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom

1921-2: Adviser on Arab Affairs to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office

1922 August: Enlisted in the Ranks of the RAF

1923 January: discharged from the RAF

1923 March: enlisted in the Tank Corps

1923: translated a French novel, The Forest Giant

1924-6: prepared the subscribers' abridgement of Seven Pillars of Wisdom

1927-8: stationed at Karachi, then Miranshah

1927 March: Revolt in the Desert, an abridgement of Seven
Pillars, published

1928: completed The Mint, began translating Homer's Odyssey

1929-33: stationed at Plymouth

1931: started working on RAF boats

1932: his translation of the Odyssey published

1933-5: attached to MAEE, Felixstowe

1935 February: retired from the RAF

1935 19 May: died from injuries received in a motor-cycle crash on 13 May

1935 21 May: buried at Moreton, Dorset

﻿

This T. E. Lawrence Studies website is edited and maintained by
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